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There is no doubt that the motivations were noble, but the past decade of climate policy could justly be summed up in three words: feel-good, expensive and ineffective. Governments around the world have poured billions into subsidies, signed grand climate pledges and drafted pages upon pages of regulation. And yet, the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere 鈥� the ultimate arbiter of our collective actions 鈥� have continued to rise, as have costs to consumers and paperwork for businesses.

Multilateral global climate policies have, with few exceptions, sprung from a recognition of the scale of the challenge and a sincere desire to address it. I know this in part because I and my company, Kayrros, have worked with decision-makers determined to play their part in preventing climate collapse. But somewhere along the way, policymaking has become divorced from the facts. Not the facts of the climate crisis 鈥� we are all aware that it is getting worse 鈥� but of how best to tackle it.

US President Donald Trump鈥檚 return to office represents not so much a departure as a clean break from the approach taken by his predecessor and his counterparts around the world. It has, understandably, triggered a wave of panic in climate circles. His administration has pulled funding, scrapped regulations and turned its back on multilateral climate efforts, exemplified by his pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement. But it is premature to see the return of Trump as catastrophic. As counterintuitive as it might at first seem, it may even turn out to be a good thing, in a Schumpeterian, 鈥渃reative destruction鈥� sense.

Climate Politics Shift

We must recognize first that in respect of the climate, Trump is not the problem but a symptom. His rise has been fueled in part by voter frustration at climate policies that have hurt their wallets without helping the planet. Net zero and broader climate skepticism is not unique to Trump voters. Indeed, it unites almost every insurgent party in the West, from the UK鈥檚 Reform UK to Germany鈥檚 Alternative fur Deutschland as well as more deeply rooted anti-establishment parties like France鈥檚 Rassemblement National. People have lost patience with the ruling approach to the climate and want something different. And yet, full-blown climate denial remains vanishingly rare. It is a tough position to hold when fires are tearing through Los Angeles or floods are devastating Valencia. In the end, neither Elon Musk, nor Trump, nor tariffs nor a new name will stop hurricanes coming from the Gulf of Mexico into America.

The more salient point about Trump鈥檚 return is that it ends, in swift and brutal fashion, the era of feel-good climate policy, by which I mean an age marked by policies, imposed globally and multilaterally, that bring only marginal (sometimes even only possible) gains for certain, often expensive losses. Electric vehicle (EV) mandates, for instance, have been presented as the best solution to the problem of carbon emissions produced by petrol cars, yet a great deal of CO2 may be emitted during the construction of the EV that you, as a climate-conscious consumer, drive to work. Their impact rests on how they are powered, for example, and how their batteries are made.

Moreover, as I write, six million jobs in the automobile industry in Europe are at risk, due to the structural advantage that Chinese EVs have over Europe鈥檚. This is not to suggest that EVs are a waste of time; far from it. It is more that they are not perfect and certainly not a panacea. My more general point is that EV policy in Europe and elsewhere in the West has been uncritically accepted as effective climate action when, on the evidence, it isn鈥檛 as effective as other actions we might take. But the toll is real, and factories are closing across Europe.

Focus on Methane

What are the other options, you might reasonably ask. Well, for one, addressing methane emissions, whose climate potency is 84 times that of its more notorious sibling, CO2. Indeed, methane action is indisputably the lowest-hanging fruit. Earth observation 鈥� loosely defined, the fusion, processing and analysis of satellite data by artificial intelligence 鈥� now lets us track methane leaks in close to real time and attribute them precisely to the operators; we know who is releasing methane into the atmosphere.

Robust studies show that half of all methane reductions in oil and gas could be made at little or no cost, as stopping leaks saves money. We just need to target the few countries and companies that do not have proper procedures and operating practices in place, such as reinjecting gas into the pipeline instead of releasing it unburnt in the atmosphere. I want to emphasize that the problem is not that climate policy as such has been pursued but the kind of climate policy we have thus far practiced, with some exceptions. Bureaucracy has been a tremendous problem. We have not drawn on the data at our disposal. Our goals have been vague, and we have not taken the time to gauge our progress and iterate on our strategies.

Realistic Solutions

If President Trump鈥檚 election forces a reckoning with this reality, that is all to the good. If it unshackles climate investors and private sector operators, as it did during his first term, then even better. For the private sector is where innovation takes place. AI and remote sensing, carbon capture, small modular reactor technology, advanced battery storage 鈥� these are the fruits of energetic creative entrepreneurs and their teams, supported by savvy investors who see the decarbonization opportunity as the next gold rush. These nascent and developing forms of technology, supported by smart regulation like targeting polluters that can be detected by satellite, are the key to solving the climate crisis.

For all the division that is spoken about so often in the Western media, there is broad support for climate policy, so long as it works. If there is fatigue, it is rooted in a belief that the lives of individuals are being made more difficult and more expensive for the sake of utopian schemes that collapse on contact with reality. Needless to say, every difficult situation requires sacrifice; but it does not follow that people鈥檚 lives must get worse for the planet to get better. Certainly, it does not follow that people鈥檚 lives must get worse for the planet to potentially get better 鈥� and in fact get worse.

The task of the next decade is to be much more realistic: to deliver solutions that are grounded in facts, particularly the context, and have the greatest likelihood of succeeding at the lowest possible cost. The good news is that those solutions exist. We just need to embrace them. Climate-conscious people want results, not ideology.

Antoine Rostand is the president of Kayrros, a leading energy and environmental intelligence company using AI and satellite data. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.